


Undertow

by verygibbous



Category: Discworld - Terry Pratchett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-08-15
Updated: 2012-08-15
Packaged: 2017-11-12 05:53:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,932
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/487445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/verygibbous/pseuds/verygibbous
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>“There’s something down there, isn’t there?” Tiffany said.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Undertow

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for Disc Fest 2012, but I couldn't finish it in time for the deadline b/c of some personal stuff going on. The prompt was _"Tiffany Aching and something long forgotten"_ and it was supposed to be sweet and nice and turned out kind of...weird. Tiffany and Jeannie being stoic buddies was so great to write though, omg. Set some vague amount of time after _I Shall Wear Midnight_ , but no major spoilers are lurking suspiciously in the shadows.

People surrounded Tiffany. It was the way things had always been since she was a little girl growing up in a house full of sisters, and little had changed since she had taken on witching. People needed her—for advice, for remedies, for balance, for a sympathetic cup of tea. They didn’t even need to see her all the time; just knowing she was there eased the busy clockwork in their hearts. She was a fixture, the young witch in the colors of the chalk, striding through the grass with her black hat pointed skywards, as essential to their little green-and-milk-blue world as the hills themselves. Noise surrounded Tiffany.  
  
In the midst of all this, she had learned to cultivate her own silence just as her grandmother had done. In actuality, she seldom had a moment to herself, but people always pictured her as a solitary figure, a body of quiet whose presence was like a soothing balm upon the land. It was what drew them to her. She was always willing to listen, and in the seemingly sleepy world of the chalk where there brimmed a thousand thousand little problems crowded together, such a person was treasured and necessary.  
  
Now, Tiffany was elbow-deep in the herb garden, the sun heavy on her back. Things were as they always were, with the sheep bleating far off and a buzzard cry occasionally breaking the mumbling quiet of the late afternoon.  
  
Maybe it was a change in the air, the cessation of a small but particular sound, a forgotten memory nudging her into uneasiness, or maybe nothing at all, as nothings so often claimed to be.  
  
“Hello?” she said, looking instinctively over her shoulder and then around. Her hands were slightly sticky from picking and pinching the herbs. The smell of rosemary clouded around her.  
  
There was no answer, of course. Why should there be?  
  
  
-  
  
  
Tiffany didn’t remember much from her last fight with the Queen. The feeling of it, of being as tall as the sky and as old as the hills, was simply too enormous for one memory to ever hold, but some shadowy ghost of sensation lingered in her dreams. The turf beneath her boots, the smell of snow and tobacco, every vein and cell of herself resonating with the tiny bones of the chalk stone, her heart beating in the earth-drowned flint, her blood breathing with the growing grass and the memory of ancient tides, wide-awake eyes taking in every big thing there was in her world and seeing it for all its small components.  
  
Yes, it was something entirely too _much_ for one sane mind to hold, even when the memory was just a faded, pale impression of itself. Real people aren’t meant to see every bright facet of the universe pure and unmixed. But Tiffany could no more be free of it than the chalk could be free of her; they belonged to each other.  
  
So she didn’t exactly remember, but that phantom of feeling never left her. She dreamed herself as the water in little roots and the whole of the blue sky. Wispy as her recollections were upon waking, she knew she had never felt afraid. It was home, she was home. Everything was familiar, most of the time.  
  
  
-  
  
  
 _It looked like a forest, one tall and bare, reaching up into a starless night. The trees were pale and leafless, strange in shape. She hadn’t been at home with the forests in the mountains, but this was even more disconcerting. It wasn’t the nervousness of being somewhere alien, but the wide, gaping, dawning of horror of something familiar gone wrong.  
  
Her boots crunched along the curiously bare and winding path, which was the muddy white of exposed chalk, uneven as if the diggers hadn’t bothered to make a clean job of it. The dust clung to her up to the knees.  
  
She brushed her hand cautiously against the bark of one tree. It was smooth as polish. The trees were too uniform for one to be completely comfortable with seeing, but at the same time they seemed so natural that it was impossible to imagine them as anything remotely manmade.  
  
It was like the White Horse, she thought. You couldn’t see it for what it was up close, but far away the image would be clear. That insistent, tip-of-the-tongue feeling prickled at her mind.  
  
Tiffany went along the path some more. Her boot crunched on a particularly large bit of chalk, and in the way of dreams, she suddenly remembered that no, chalk didn’t feel like that at all. A witch could maybe trust her thumbs, but she had relied more often on her feet.  
  
She knelt down. Not chalk. Not exactly chalk. A sea shell. Tiffany picked it up, holding the little thing up like a gibbous moon between thumb and forefinger. Her mind crept closer and closer to the yawning pit of cold realization. She looked around and—  
  
The ground wasn’t just chalk, but a pale and almost pristine graveyard of small bones and shells half-crushed into smoothness. And once she saw the little shapes, the big one become very clear: not a forest, but a skeleton.  
  
 _ Tiffany woke up.  
  
  
-  
  
  
The next night, she dreamed of the tide coming in but never leaving, one deep and dark so all the better for the things inside it.  
  
  
-  
  
  
Tiffany went to see Jeannie. Witches worked alone sure enough, but she had never been one for interpreting dreams. There weren’t many people she could confide such things to either since witches were supposed to be the ones being confided _in_. She could trust Jeannie though—she was the kelda after all.  
  
“I’m nervous,” Tiffany admitted.  
  
“Are ye nervous because ye dinnae understand it?” said Jeannie. She gazed levelly at Tiffany. “No need to bristle, hag o’ mine. I am nae here to scoff at ye or say to your dreams are just dreams. I dinnae need to tell ye there’s nothing harmless about it.”  
  
“No,” sighed Tiffany, “I didn’t think it would be.” They were both too experienced to be able to blissfully dismiss dreams as nothing but a jumble of the leftover thoughts as most people could.  
  
“But I need to know what—what it is. It seems familiar to me, but I’ve no clue why,” she added. “The feegles have been here for a long time. Have you got any idea at all?”  
  
“Your memories and ours together may go back very far, but I dinnae think ‘tis long enough. Not exactly.” She held up a small hand, stopping Tiffany’s question before it could be asked. “’Tis nae very much.”  
  
“It would be more than what I have right now.”  
  
There was a long pause before Jeannie spoke. “Those are nae just dreams. They are memories. The _land’s_ memories. Look to your name, _Tir-far-Thiónn_. Ye are the land under wave. Ye are as much the heart o’ it as the flint is the hear t o’ the chalk. I was nae even born in these hills, but it’s clear as water just to look at ye.”  
  
“But,” said Tiffany, then stopped. Her mind ticked over with ideas faint as shadows in shadow, just out of reach. “Memories of what?” she asked instead.  
  
The kelda smiled thinly. “Who could know better than ye?”  
  
  
-  
  
  
Millions of years ago the sea covered the land, and when the tiny creatures in it died, their shells drifted and piled and were pressed together to become chalk. When the sea went, the land remained. The chalk was a remainder of a distant and strange past, one that still lurked beneath the surface of the sleepy, grassy downlands. It was something that every child living there knew, whether gleaned from grandparents, skipping rhymes, or the travelling teachers.  
  
But the sea was a long time ago, longer than the forests that used to cover the hills, so Tiffany had never dwelled on it much. Witches were kept busy by the present.  
  
At the moment however, she spent what precious free time she had reading about the sea. Words and illustrations swam across her vision, and every now and then she would come across something she had picked up at some point in her childhood, forgotten and kept away in the attic of her memories until now. The water cycle, the science of tidal waves, aquatic food chains, woodcut prints of fossils, illustrations of fish from warm waters and whales from the cold, old maps full of vast blue-painted oceans and tiny ships, carefully labeled pictures of strange underwater greenery—it went on and on, to things less scientific, like mermaids, buried treasure, the souls of dolphins, gods full of curses, and the monsters in the sea.  
  
The chalk for the most part was a place of sensible, feet-on-the-ground solidity, full of sensible people with feet so firmly planted that they probably sprouted leaves come spring. It was old though, very old, and even they bent to the will of its unchanging center.  Time would change things certainly, but the ancient heart of the chalk that you found in its songs and hand-me-down legends, in the White Horse and the wisp of sheep’s wool in the grave of every shepherd, would endure. And if the chalk was born of the sea, how different were they? The downlands were unchanging in their own way, but the anachronistic nature of the sea echoed through it even now. Even if the tide was long gone, an invisible ocean still remained in the foundation of the land.  
  
As she read, Tiffany found that she wasn’t so much discovering any new information, just—sharpening what she already knew, as it were. Reading made her muddled thoughts more precise. Her head was clearer this way, more assured and with a clearer idea of what was going on. By all means, she should have felt better for it because a well-informed Tiffany was usually a confident one. The emergence of this inkling of an idea was terrible though, almost breathtaking in its enormity.  
  
She didn’t like it.  
  
  
-  
  
  
“What do you know about gods?” Tiffany asked Jeannie one day over a cup of tea. Her tone was light and calm, a plain indication of her underlying anxiety. Jeannie knew this, and Tiffany knew that she knew.  
  
“We have nae got much business with that bunch,” she replied, tranquil as a pond in winter, “and neither does hags, if I recall correctly.”  
  
“That’s right,” agreed Tiffany. She sipped delicately at her tea. The deliberately placed pocket of silence wasn’t a trap but a question in itself, asking politely but firmly for a substantial answer.  
  
“You’re worried about the small gods,” said Jeannie, putting down her own very small teacup. “A good...hypothesis. Ye’ve got more dead kings, sacred burial mounds, and mysterious stone fixtures than is good for ye here.”  
  
Tiffany frowned. “But I’m wrong.”  
  
“I think you’re just missing some o’ the right vocabulary. _I_ might be as well. But why don’t ye tell me what you’re thinking first?”  
  
“There’s something down there, isn’t there?” Tiffany said. She stared pensively into her cup, squeaking a finger around the rim. “Or was, maybe. That’s what I’m remembering.”  
  
“Aye.”  
  
“It feels—sounds, really—like something big. I thought it might be an animal, maybe a spirit, or a lot of minds all together. It’s so—loud. It doesn’t feel entirely like any animal I’ve ever seen, though. I’ve gone Borrowing a lot, especially recently so I could get a hold on what it could be, but it’s _strange_. Not human enough, too human. So it’s something else, I’m thinking. A god of some sort wouldn’t be too far a stretch, especially a little one, but it doesn’t feel small. A small god wouldn’t be like this, would it? Lots of them maybe, in a swarm or something like. I never felt it before. It’s like,” Tiffany paused for breath, lips thinning as she struggled to describe it, “something just…woke up. I can’t make heads or tail of it. It’s like nothing I ever encountered, but it _feels_ like I’ve known it before and like I ought to right now.” Her voice had by the end turned into a quick, frustrated thing, and she hated that. She hated feeling so helpless in what was supposed to be her own home, to be made to feel like a child again with no notion of what to do next.  
  
Even as a child, she had hated asking adults to help her, preferring always to do things by herself. She and Jeannie weren’t so different in age, however you went about counting them for Feegles, but Jeannie was a kelda, a queen of hundreds; Tiffany felt like a child in her presence now. She was used to doing things alone, and became endlessly prickly and irritated when she couldn’t, but she still held her breath waiting for the assurance and relief of someone else explaining things, of someone who knew better somehow making things better. She should have known better of course, especially from experience with other witches and keldas both, that this wouldn’t be the case.  
  
“What do you think it is?” said Jeanie instead, perfectly serene. A well of silence opened again, expectant.  
  
 _I don’t know!_ _That’s why I asked you,_ Tiffany wanted to say. _I need your help._ Her pride wouldn’t let her, and the look Jeannie was pointedly not giving her wouldn’t either.  So she bit her tongue and struggled for words, already annoyed because they usually came so easily to her. What the madly whirring gears of her mind produced sounded like nonsense.  
  
“It’s a monster,” she said, eyes hard and mouth set as if to scare the childishness of the words right out.  
  
“Well done,” Jeannie said with a smile that was equal parts grim and pleased. “A monster is a thing o’ human construction however, whether literally or metaphorically if ye want to be exact. This is nae that sort o’ thing. I know what ye mean though, and you’re right. And ye were right the first time too.”  
  
“First time?”  
  
“Not was. Is. Somethin’ _is_ down there, or will be.”  
  
“Kelda,” said Tiffany, “ _Do you know what it is_?”  
  
A shadow of unusual hesitation passed over Jeannie’s face. “We have nae business with it, _Tir-far-Thiónn._ ” She held up a hand, stopping Tiffany’s protest in its tracks. “But we will nae have any choice soon enough. I told ye before I dinnae know much about it. Ye said ye thought it was a god, and ye were right in a way. ‘Tis an old, old thing, a sea-born thing. Nae just any whale-fish nor sea-dragon. ‘Twas here before the chalk and before the men and even before the fair-folk. We dinnae speak o’ it. We hardly know what _it_ is. I dinnae know what it was when it was alive in the gone sea, but ye can be sure that men found what was left o’ it one day, them old bones inside the chalk-stone, and ye know what humans are like. What d’ye think they did?” She sighed, rubbing at her eyes. “A thing from afore the steps o’ man and monster alike, put on a pedestal like that. And ye being who ye are, hearing its echoes from beneath the land. What could it mean? It’s nae even a dead thing, lying eternal under your own feet, in your own sacred ground. How can it be, when ye yourself can see it clear as day in your mind’s eye? A memory ye dinnae remember having—what could be trying to warn ye? The land knows, my big wee girl, and it knows _ye_.”  
  
A short, nervy exhale. “Good grief,” Tiffany managed, “doesn’t it just.”  
  
“And what will ye do, when the time comes?” said Jeannie sharply. Her manner eased a little, taking in the sight of the girl in front of her. Tiffany wasn’t even twenty yet but she looked like she had years and years weighing on her shoulders.  
  
 “I’ll be here,” she said. “What else is there?”  
  
  
-  
  
  
In the coming days, Tiffany dreamed of black oceans and great big eyes, ghost-white limbs and strange sounds. She dreamed of drowning, dreamed a harpoon in her hand, a red sky with no moon, dead grass crumbling beneath her boots. Ships, hot winds, and a clinging, gaping paleness. A taste of salt, lingering metallic on her tongue when she awoke.  
  
She never screamed though, or cried, only ever gritted her teeth as her body flinched out of a troubled slumber. She was afraid, but at least she was surer this time, no longer stumbling around blind. Now she could _work_. If you looked hard at her quiet exterior, you could see the anxiety boiling away like water in a kettle; if you looked harder, you’d see the unyielding sharpness of flint, ever ready to sink into whatever was unwise enough to get in her way.  
  
Tiffany kept busy. She saw to her people, to the young witches in her charge, to the sheep. If she heard a shadow on the edge of sight or saw the tinkle of shivering flowers, she kept it to herself. What she had to say about the skittish bees, no one knew. If she stayed awake for gibbous moons, a shamble between her hands, that was her own business. What could anyone make of shades in the water and the murmuring of grasses in the breeze? No one went digging, certainly.  
  
Something was coming and she would be ready. She made sure of it.


End file.
